Mao II

Aug 06, 2011 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars

As with Underworld, the opening prologue—based upon an actual occurrence—of the mass-wedding of young and youngish couples of the Unification Church, held in Yankee Stadium and performed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, is one of the strongest points of the book. DeLillo excels at such portraits set to the page, crisply and potently capturing the atmosphere of this bizarre and fascinating spectacle, with its ordered ranks of veils and ties, the regimented structure and candle-row colors that deli...more As with Underworld, the opening prologue—based upon an actual occurrence—of the mass-wedding of young and youngish couples of the Unification Church, held in Yankee Stadium and performed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, is one of the strongest points of the book. DeLillo excels at such portraits set to the page, crisply and potently capturing the atmosphere of this bizarre and fascinating spectacle, with its ordered ranks of veils and ties, the regimented structure and candle-row colors that delineated the transformation of an intimate ceremony of personal commitment into a crowded and raucous affirmation of cultish charisma. After such a starkly adrenal opening, DeLillo then blurs and abrades with his initial meet-and-greet between reclusive author Bill Gray and Brita, a journalist who is bound and bent upon photographing every living major writer—and continuing through to the confusing ending in Beirut, which sees Brita apparently about to compound Bill's failure to spring a versifying hostage held by Lebanese terrorists. This is primarily a series of mobile and difficult dialogues—delivered by characters who all sound like Don DeLillo—centering upon the state of art, fiction, photography, and mass-phenomena in this, our modern age, when terrorism was on the verge of becoming the Next Big Thing—compared to fictional portraits or visual representations, a far more potent and pyrotechnic means of effecting changes in societies, of steering political discourse, of grabbing the world's attention and focussing it upon problems that were previously ignored. Where are we at when the authorial pen has been displaced in immediacy and influence by the kalashnikov and high-explosives? When murderous theatre proves the ablest way to advance one's political agenda, to broadcast in—and capture—the medium of the real?

Mao II was my introduction to Don DeLillo, read many, many years ago. I enjoyed it even while feeling it cooly kept me at a distance—its text, to me, a murky river whose current moved quickly and revealed little upon the first glance. I would actually like to return to this someday, especially in this new millennium featuring the Global War on Terror and that most horrific and course-changing of days: September 11th, 2001. I was impressed with the style and trappings of Mao II the first time around, while never believing I had fully grasped what DeLillo wished to get across—perhaps a second journey would leave me more appreciative of the author's prescience in gauging the future potentiality for Terror.(less)

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Apr 30, 2008 Lara rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I feel very safe when I read Delillo. I know I am going somewhere worthwhile, and I know that I can trust him to get me there smoothly and gently, that the time will pass and the journey and destination and details will all be taken care of. This novel is, by turns, deeply real and entirely metaphysical, an eloquent portrait of a small collection of individuals and individual drives and pains, and an entirely artificial means for Delillo to explore principles of art and meaning-making within the...more I feel very safe when I read Delillo. I know I am going somewhere worthwhile, and I know that I can trust him to get me there smoothly and gently, that the time will pass and the journey and destination and details will all be taken care of. This novel is, by turns, deeply real and entirely metaphysical, an eloquent portrait of a small collection of individuals and individual drives and pains, and an entirely artificial means for Delillo to explore principles of art and meaning-making within the frame of larger political realities. It is a meditation on charismatic power and the function of literature in contemporary society, among other things.

I have heard that Delillo flirts with radical ideologies but rarely espouses them directly, preferring instead to allow their language and intentions to creep from the mouths of characters here and there. I was fascinated by those elements in this book - so potentially (falsely?) autobiographical at times. It is always dangerous to write about a writer, as all readers will secretly assume they see into the author him/herself. I think it is more likely, more useful, to see all characters, all situations, as products of the writer's mind, but not necessarily theses, not direct representations of belief or conviction, but merely maps of where that mind has been, seen in reflections and echoes and opposites.

Delillo's writer, Bill Gray - a character struggling with the nearly stereotypical writerly miseries of solipsism, doubt, and hatred of one's own work - has internalized the idea that writers are obsolete in the contemporary world. He decides that writers no longer hold the power to alter society's consciousness, cannot speak loudly enough or radically enough to create or catalyze change. Instead, the role of true belief and action has been taken over by the political concept of terror. Terrorists have become the only genuine voices of conviction and ideals that the world will listen to.

This idea is played out through a series of lucid and unlikely events that take on the glow and enchantment of one-act plays. Each is firmly rooted in the ground of the text, but has a meditative and inevitable quality that brings the reader in and out of the plot, rising and sinking along a fine line of abstraction and solidity. The writing is beautiful and familiar, the characters recognizable and strange, set against a backdrop of late 1980s and early 90s political iconography, and a thin running thread of Mao.

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Dec 18, 2012 Nick rated it 2 of 5 stars

Much to my disappointment, I found this mostly a tepid underwhelming experience, especially after being captured and swept away by Underworld. To me, this seems to be a treatise on the importance of author and the novel. But the aggrandized protagonist came across as no more than a writer specializing in run-on sentences whom infused his work with an inflated sense of importance.

Of course I wouldn't have finished it if there was nothing redeeming. I love Delillo's understated yet powerful prose...more

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Jul 11, 2008 Richard rated it 3 of 5 stars

I am a fan of Don DeLillo's artistic ambition and his want to address ideas more profound than simple character study. When Tom Wolfe wrote his diatribe against MFA writing programs and accused them of passing along a tradition of meaningless, nonempathetic stories rather than work that addresses morality and social meaning, he undermined his own argument with his own bare-faced self-promotion of _The Bonfire of the Vanities_, a work that may in essence have fit his own ideal but was poorly stru...more I am a fan of Don DeLillo's artistic ambition and his want to address ideas more profound than simple character study. When Tom Wolfe wrote his diatribe against MFA writing programs and accused them of passing along a tradition of meaningless, nonempathetic stories rather than work that addresses morality and social meaning, he undermined his own argument with his own bare-faced self-promotion of _The Bonfire of the Vanities_, a work that may in essence have fit his own ideal but was poorly structured and almost unreadable in the end.

But Wolfe had an interesting point, proof of which was the simple fact that his statements caused such ire and intellectual retaliation among the MFA community. In the end, Wolfe would have done better to have used DeLillo as his primary example of writing that aspires to his ideal. DeLillo writes about people, but in the broadest sense of the term. He dwells not only in his characters, which is often the stopping point for many short-minded fictioneers with an assumption that their characters are worth reading (which often means that they are not), but also what those characters mean to the society they are in. _Libra_ is a wonderful example of this, as is _White Noise_ and _Cosmopolis_. Even in works where DeLillo's representations remain as just representations and do not engage as characters themselves (_Ratner's Star_), I am always impressed with his artistic ambition. DeLillo has a lot to say about the world, both topically and philosophically. This book, _Mao II_, is one that dwells on many relatively recent events (the Reverend Moon mass wedding, Khomeni's death), but even when read in 2006, these events hold meaning to the central points DeLillo is out to address--the influence of mass character over singular character, and the effect of art on the human psyche (and in this book, he even allows terrorism to enter into the world of art).

_Mao II_ is a work of DeLillo nearly at his best. We deal with singular characters who resonate strongly off the page--there is Karen, a former Reverend Moon cultist who has been only partly relieved through deprogramming. There is Brita, a photographer who deals only writers as her subject. She manages to schedule a session with Bill, a legendary writer who has been self-reclusive and unsure about whether to relinquish his latest project onto the world. And there is his secretary/assistant/connection to the real world, Scott. Every one of these characters, and the characters to come as Bill is drawn into a plan to reveal himself at a benefit for a poet who has been kidnapped in Beirut, distinguish themselves through DeLillo's sharp and witty prose, but they also deal with philosophical concepts regarding society, indentity and art, and it is here that DeLillo is always at his finest. While in books like _The Names_, the characters overconsume the content and diffuse both, in _Mao II_, the characters are sharply intersting because of both their moments of sympathy and antipathy. In short, his characters feel fully fleshed out rather than spokespersons of philosophy, which was what dragged down books line _Ratner's Star_.

The work of any artist must be looked at in its entirety rather than by singular example. A great poet is not one who has written one great poem, but has written a canon of work that has sometimes produced godliness, often greatness, and sometimes total misses. DeLillo can be considered a great writer even in the misses, for what he tries to do often far surpasses the greatest work of mediocre writers who dwell too much in the immediate rather than the universal. _Mao II_ may not be one of his greatest works and may not be pondered and scribed over like _Underworld_ or _White Noise_, but it is a great book, and I think many a DeLillo fan will cherish it for its precision and its thinking.
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Dec 03, 2011 Meter added it

I would like to give this novel a higher rating. I really would. It went well 1/3 of the time and bored much of the rest.

The writing is technically fine, polished. I enjoyed the ex-Unification Church (moonie) character the best by far. She is the only one I cared about.

The parts through the middle with philosophical meanderings on being a writer were almost unbearable. The theme of images was at times compelling and at times obvious/disappointing. Much of both felt rehashed from quarries that...more

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Dec 17, 2012 Ajay R rated it 4 of 5 stars

Images, both static and moving have been a recurrent motif with Don DeLillo. (In many of his works you have a character seeing the grainy images on TV with the volume turned down in a dark room) .In 'Mao II', he combines them with the themes of cults, crowds and creates a disturbing and unsettling work. Bill Gray, author of 2 acclaimed books has been living as a recluse for the last 20 odd years. Working on a uncompleted novel the whole time, never satisfied with his output, living in a secluded...more

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Dec 06, 2012 Anmol Goel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Mao II: One for the Crowds or Best Left Alone?

Mao II, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992, is Don Delillo’s tenth novel. Readers of previous Don Delillo works, like White Noise, know that Don Delillo is a specialist of unsettling atmospheres. To me, the most unsettling of them all was the dark attic that contained all of the different parts of the books, from chapters of books stowed away in large boxes, and in the lone corner of the room, with a lantern and a typewriter the main character...more
Mao II: One for the Crowds or Best Left Alone?

Mao II, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992, is Don Delillo’s tenth novel. Readers of previous Don Delillo works, like White Noise, know that Don Delillo is a specialist of unsettling atmospheres. To me, the most unsettling of them all was the dark attic that contained all of the different parts of the books, from chapters of books stowed away in large boxes, and in the lone corner of the room, with a lantern and a typewriter the main character, a famous recluse named Bill Gray, who thinks that he is finished—as a writer. I appreciated the main conflict of this book, the ideas of a terrorist are easier to receive than an author's ideas, but the way Delillo decides to write Mao II leads to some jarring transitions.

There are also some similarities between Delillo and Bill. Both use a typewriter and work for hours at a time and then break in between. Delillo also writes in solitude, with a quiet house. His typed drafts pile up around the house, for him to look back at a beastly scrawl at the bottom of a sheet. The first draft of his book, Libra sits in ten manuscript boxes; he likes to discard sentences as much as he finds joy in creating them.

Two years prior to the writing of this book, in 1989, New York Post ambushed J.D. Salinger, Delillo used Salinger’s photo and a photo of the Unification Blessing Ceremony and said to Vince Passaro, “I didn’t know it at the time, but these two photos are the extremes of “Mao II,” the arch individualist and the mass mind, from the mind of the terrorist, to the mind of the mass organization. In both cases, it’s the death of the individual that has to be accomplished before their aims can be realized.” The last sentence of the prologue, “The future belongs to the crowds.” reveals a main theme that runs throughout the entire book. One of the main characters Scott believes that if Bill Gray were to release this book to the masses, the “real” Bill Gray would be lost and the book would also lose some meaning. The way that Delillo emphasizes this is by introducing crowds throughout the book. He uses crowds to show how they can corrupt as well as augment someone's personality. In fact, the first scene of the Unification Ceremony in the prologue introduces a major character, Bill's second assistant Karen, as well as some major themes in the book.

The thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and down and sneak secret glances at the faces coming down. People dangle teabags over hot water in white cups... People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night, knowing that there is something they've forgotten to do. The future belongs to the crowds (16.)

The imagery in this book is absolutely fantastic, it was like I could see these scenes play out in front of me. But there are some bad things about this smorgasbord of imagery.

Now while I did enjoy reading this, the spontaneity in which Delillo switches ideas is very unsettling, like the novel itself, and it has led me to reread parts of the book and try and decipher the postmodern code that Delillo wants to write in. Maybe it is because he read comic books as a child, so “[He has] no storytelling drive, a drive to follow a certain kind of narrative rhythm.” Delillo says in an interview.

This is not a book that will flatter the reader. Anyone who wants a book that succeeds in over-the-top imagery that will leave the reader questioning reality and whether being famous really is a good thing, should read this book.

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Mar 03, 2012 Bucho R. rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: traditional-realism

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I never had to read any DeLillo for class. I kept hearing about his book "White Noise," which won the National Book Award in 1985. But I'm weird about the books I choose to read in that I won't read the hot seller or big name from an author first. I don't scour the bestseller lists to find out what's selling and who people are reading. I avoid the hype as much as possible so I can keep my opinion on the writer and their writing as unbiased and fair as possible. On that note, I picked up DeLillo'...more

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Dec 04, 2011 Jeremiah rated it 5 of 5 stars

As I was finishing up this book, I started to explain the plot of this book to some friends over dinner, and they both said: "That sounds stupid." Admittedly, it's a little farfetched: a reclusive writer steps away from his failing project and becomes directly involved in trying to free a hostage from a Lebanese terrorist group.

Still, I was fascinated by this book by the time I finished it. I read that this book was inspired by two photographs from the '80s. One of Khomeini's funeral and one of...more As I was finishing up this book, I started to explain the plot of this book to some friends over dinner, and they both said: "That sounds stupid." Admittedly, it's a little farfetched: a reclusive writer steps away from his failing project and becomes directly involved in trying to free a hostage from a Lebanese terrorist group.

Still, I was fascinated by this book by the time I finished it. I read that this book was inspired by two photographs from the '80s. One of Khomeini's funeral and one of the reclusive J.D. Salinger. And from those two photos, a connection between art and terrorism was made. Have you ever read Everything that Rises, by Lawrence Weschler? To me, it's like that. This book is a perfect example (well, almost perfect; I thought the dialog felt written, not spoken in any realistic life) of examining the kind of hidden connections between two seemingly disparate things. This connection swirls around throughout the book and ties the events together.

And it does so with great success. At least, greater success than I've read in some of DeLillo's more recent work. To be honest, after reading Point Omega -- yes, I'm reading him in a poor order -- I was kind of frustrated. I disliked DeLillo's continued reliance on juxtaposing some kind of art or performance art with pieces of shared history, some kind of reclusivity, and invocations of Americanism. In fact, as much as I liked this book, I started off thinking, "This sounds just like the beginning of Underworld." The first sentence is almost identical. Still, here it works. Almost everything works here.

Now, as I read books for pleasure, I also think about teaching them to high school students. To me(having only read 4.5 of his books), whether you love it or hate it or are lukewarm about it, this seems like the quintessential DeLillo. It would be a great introduction to him. Because of its style, because of the familiar and obvious motifs. I feel like a lot of people think if that if they understand something too easily, if there's less of a chase to it, the value of that thing is diminished. But, come on. Dickens is easy. Steinbeck is easy. Neither is overrated. Not that I'm trying to compare DeLillo to those two, but the guy is a good writer, when he's on, and this is a good book.

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Sep 23, 2011 Dan rated it 1 of 5 stars

I once read an interview with DeLillo, where he claimed that he often liked to change or rearrange words in his sentences for the sound or effect it created, even if it ended up changing the meaning of the sentence entirely. For me, this just smacks of irresponsibility for someone held in such high literary esteem, and demonstrates his overriding pretentiousness as a novelist.

The characters in this novel speak without any realism, seeming to communicate only in profound aphorisms to pound home t...more

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Mar 25, 2011 Jonathan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Mao II tells the very postmodern story of a postmodern writer, his postmodern assistant who keeps the old man afloat, and the very postmodern pyschoward who lives with both the men and once got hitched in a mass-marriage ceremony while a member of the Unification Church.

Bill, the writer, is a recluse; did I mention that? Yea, he’s like your Thomas Pynchon/Salinger type writer who loves being far away from anyone and everyone. Well one day Bill is photographed by a photojournalist named Brita. An...more

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Jan 22, 2011 Anthony rated it 3 of 5 stars

Plot-wise, the back cover tells us MAO II is the story of reclusive author Bill Gray who, stuck for years now on a failed novel, is inspired to leave his reclusive life and become involved in a group's attempts to get a French poet released from hostage captivity in Beirut. Bill's sudden change in attitude is brought on by an encounter with a world-renowned photographer, and his actions leave his obsessive-compulsive assistant Scott and Scott's girlfriend Karen at a loss for what to do while wai...more Plot-wise, the back cover tells us MAO II is the story of reclusive author Bill Gray who, stuck for years now on a failed novel, is inspired to leave his reclusive life and become involved in a group's attempts to get a French poet released from hostage captivity in Beirut. Bill's sudden change in attitude is brought on by an encounter with a world-renowned photographer, and his actions leave his obsessive-compulsive assistant Scott and Scott's girlfriend Karen at a loss for what to do while waiting for Bill's return to what they consider normalcy.

That's the plot, but the book is "about" something larger. It took me a few days after reading the book to figure out exactly what that larger thing is. Ultimately, I think, the book is about the Cult of Personality. DeLillo litters the book with references to Andy Warhol, to Chairman Mao, to the Ayatollah Khomeini. Anyone who fails to draw at least a surface connection between Bill Gray and J.D. Salinger just isn't paying attention. Scott is concerned that Bill's reputation and reprint rights are based on what people think he is up to in his seclusion, and that if he publishes this latest novel (failed or not, we never really get to see the contents) people will no longer be intrigued. The French poet is held hostage by a Communist terrorist building a following in Beirut, whose followers give up their own identities to be a part of his. Even the photographer, Brita, builds her career around a sort of cult: she travels the world photographing writers almost exclusively.

The opening section of the book, which focuses on Karen and takes place at the Mass Wedding lead by the Rev. Moon at Yankees Stadium, almost lost me. DeLillo bounces between at least three (that I could count) distinct points of view, sometimes in mid-paragraph, and the feeling I had by the end of the section was that this work was going to be too pretentious, too arty for me. Had the rest of the book continued in that vein, I might not have been able to finish it. Happily (for me), the remainder of the book is written a bit more traditionally. Actually, it becomes a bit heavy on the dialogue side for a while -- characters jumping on various soap-boxes and rambling, dissembling, reminiscing, pontificating. At first, the penchant for characters to spout non-sequiturs bothered me, but ultimately that's what real conversations are like, aren't they? So DeLillo does capture that aspect of real life, even if some of his diatribes go on a bit long. He also does a nice job of allowing we, the readers, to see where all of the characters ultimately end up even if the characters themselves have lost track of each other.

I can't say that MAO II has inspired me to rush out and start reading everything Don DeLillo has ever written, but I am glad I made the effort to read the book.(less)

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Mar 13, 2013 Wilson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The final sequence of Mao II’s prologue explicitly states one of the major themes of this dense and klaedioscopic novel, “The future belongs to crowds”. The prologue, probably the most engaging section of the novel, describes a Unification church mass wedding at Yankee Stadium through the eyes of dislocated parents searching for their daughter in amongst the mass of Moonies. It is a thematic firework that echoes throughout the rest of the novel. Mao II is a book filled with crowds, from the walk...more The final sequence of Mao II’s prologue explicitly states one of the major themes of this dense and klaedioscopic novel, “The future belongs to crowds”. The prologue, probably the most engaging section of the novel, describes a Unification church mass wedding at Yankee Stadium through the eyes of dislocated parents searching for their daughter in amongst the mass of Moonies. It is a thematic firework that echoes throughout the rest of the novel. Mao II is a book filled with crowds, from the walk through a teeming park in New York to the mourners at the Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral, if this had been a sociological paper then it would have been an investigation on collective identity at its most obscure. The imagery and description of the crowds that De Lillo employs is quite amazing at times, he brings a chaotic and breathless tone to the real historic events that he crafts into the narrative, the funeral of Khomeini, in particular, is a masterclass of authorial illustration.

Mao II feels like an attempt at a state of the nation novel, written in 1991; however, perhaps the most lasting impression that the narrative left on me was the uncomfortably predictive nature of the novel, the mass hysteria of crowds when faced with historically important events and the move towards the inevitable war on terror. Mao II has perhaps gained importance that it did not have when released, because in a post 9/11 world, the nature of terrorism, as discussed in Mao II becomes something more vital to understand, and De Lillo askance writing offers no solutions.

De Lillo’s customary flat dialogue and humourous eye for a detail is very much part of the mix here, however, the book is slight on characterisation, the main character acts predominantly as a defined counterpoint to crowd behaviour and his solitude seems very much in keeping with the prevalent theme of the novel. However, he never convinces as real, nor does he ever become particularly interesting. It is flaw, for me, in what is otherwise a startling novel.
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Jun 18, 2011 Jona rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Mao II (1994), by Don DeLillo. The ostensible central subject of this novel is a novelist recluse, Bill Gray, who has spent the past few decades working on, but never finishing, his latest novel. Other characters include Scott, a veritable old-school 'butler' who handles all of Bill's affairs and keeps his whereabouts secret; Brita, a photographer taking pictures of writers; Karen, a girl who lives with Scott and Bill and functions as a sort of funnel for their emotional, sexual, and existential...more Mao II (1994), by Don DeLillo. The ostensible central subject of this novel is a novelist recluse, Bill Gray, who has spent the past few decades working on, but never finishing, his latest novel. Other characters include Scott, a veritable old-school 'butler' who handles all of Bill's affairs and keeps his whereabouts secret; Brita, a photographer taking pictures of writers; Karen, a girl who lives with Scott and Bill and functions as a sort of funnel for their emotional, sexual, and existential anxieties; Charles, Bill's one-time publisher; and George Haddad, a terrorist group sympathizer who ends up having some rather revealing conversations with Bill.

The narrative is framed by two loosely linked short stories: the prologue tells of a mass marriage at Yankee stadium in which Karen participated, and the epilogue follows Brita as she abandons her writer-photograph project and instead takes an assignment photographing the reader of a Maoist terrorist group in Beirut. The two frames set up the themes of the novel nicely: the power of the crowd, the search for meaning in people's lives, its connection to the post-modern world of images, and its exploitability by totalitarian projects.

The actual narrative of the novel begins when Brita arrives to the remote house where Bill, Scott, and Karen live, in order to take some photographs of Bill, which fills up Part One of the novel. It sets up the dynamics between the characters, and exposes some of Bill's central anxieties: the role of himself and other writers in the modern world and the 'freezing' or death-like quality of the image. At the end of Part One, Charles invites Bill to participate in an event staged to secure the release of a Swiss poet held hostage by a terrorist group in Beirut, by reading some of the poet's work and telling of his release on live television, which is supposed to be followed directly by the actual release of the poet by the group (who ostensibly cannot resist the power of the mediated image). Part Two follows Bill to London where the event is to take place, but it is botched by an unexpected bombing. Bill then travels east and meets up with George Haddad in Athens, and they talk extensively about the motives of the terrorist group and Bill's supposed affinity with its aims (which Bill disagrees with). Bill also starts writing scraps of a story about the captured poet, which we see two glimpses of. In Athens, Bill is run over by a car and injured, but he still travels to Cyprus in order to gain passage to Lebanon, to step in contact with the terrorist group, perhaps to offer himself up as a hostage in place of the poet. From Cyprus, he manages to board a boat to Lebanon, but never makes it there, as he dies in his cabin on board. All the while, he is searched for by Scott and Karen, whom he never even talks to about the plot for the poet's release.

My own feelings about the novel are rather conflicted. On the one hand, DeLillo's writing style is, as always, excellent. Some passages are difficult to read because of his tendency to skip between images that are incongruous on the surface, but taking the effort to plow through them is always rewarding. Further, DeLillo's dialogues are as always an amazing experience. They seem to straddle the line between the said and the unsaid - characters often appear to be talking past each other, as if they were linked on some transcendent level that goes beyond the actual words exchanged in a conversation (or as if what we're reading is more of a 'digest' of the conversation than its actual transcript). That this still makes sense and flows rather nicely testifies to DeLillo's skills as a writer.

On the other hand, I never like novels whose themes are announced directly. In DeLillo's work, Ratner's Star is probably the most egregious example - metaphysical musings put into the mouths of stand-in characters (as in the worst of Pynchon's writing). Mao II also mentions its theme explicitly: the feeling that 'the future belongs to the crowd', that the rise of new media flattens subjectivity in search for a higher absolute meaning - as in fanatical followings of Mao Zedong, Ayatollah Khomeini, terrorist leaders, or religious leaders that are such a prominent running theme of the book. In such a world, Bill Gray - a writer who firmly believes in Bakhtinian heteroglossia and intersubjectivity, as he says explicitly in one of his conversations with Haddad - has no place. Ironically, the macro-narrative makes of Bill in death precisely what he rejected in life: his pictures become the only thing that is left of him, and Scott decides to try keep his unfinished novel unpublished, in order to give Bill an aura akin to that of such religiously followed figures.

That 'crowd mentality' erases the multiplicity of subjectivities is, of course, a rather naïve notion. (It has not been borne out by history: if anything, new media - from television to the Internet - have increased the possibility for heteroglossia to assert itself, even if the tally of actual achievements has to date been low.) Indeed, there are sub-texts in Mao II that appear to deride this very idea: George Haddad's belief in the power of crowds' search for meaning is self-contradictory, and Karen fails to 'create' meaning for a crowd of homeless and workless slum-dwellers she works among during the period of Bill's disappearance. It's impossible to say what DeLillo's own viewpoint on the matter is (which, again, re-confirms the persistence of heteroglossia, at least in a novelistic medium). In other words, on a close reading, Mao II goes against the notion that 'the novelist's power to influence the inner life of a culture' now belongs to images, of which the terrorist's image of violence is the most powerful. There is more to it than that - people search for meaning, but not in a mindless or uniform way. But this reading is much too subtle - it is much too easy to just read the novel as lamenting the rise of mindless crowd mentality. This is why - although it is undoubtedly very well-written - I haven't found it as good as it could have been.(less)

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Aug 20, 2012 Etta rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

Maybe this is too well-written to merit only two stars. But mere technical competence shouldn't be enough for me at this point; there are also good unicyclists.

Much of the first half of the novel is taken up by pomo musings—poetic trains of thought about images on TV, how photographs are perfected by the deaths of their subjects, how they alter the memory of their subjects after death. There's also a lot about crowds: we see a sort of anxiety about collectivism experienced by Americans i.e. "ind...more Maybe this is too well-written to merit only two stars. But mere technical competence shouldn't be enough for me at this point; there are also good unicyclists.

Much of the first half of the novel is taken up by pomo musings—poetic trains of thought about images on TV, how photographs are perfected by the deaths of their subjects, how they alter the memory of their subjects after death. There's also a lot about crowds: we see a sort of anxiety about collectivism experienced by Americans i.e. "individualists," as well a musings about terrorism which are elaborated further upon in the novel's second half. Terrorists are counterposed to novelists: the novel is "democratic" (anyone can write one!—most of the best novelists turn out to be male Europeans, by the way), and in a more innocent time the novelists could alter the content of the culture. Nowadays, "terror" serves that function—for better or for worse, "terror" is the the only means of expression that serves the function that novels once did (art in general, perhaps). Terrorists, moreover, are the ultimate collectivists, sacrificing their own individuality (by dedicating themselves to whatever great leader) and that of others (by killing them).

Mao pops up throughout the novel as a sort of idée fixe, but this image never seems to be transformed or problematized either directly or by context. (Actually he appears most commonly in a rendition by Andy Warhol, famous for his works that glamorized both icons of consumerism, and grotesque violence. There was ample opportunity for DeLillo to explote all kinds of interesting idea—or rather, Warholian ideas—but he chose not to, for some reason.) Rather, Mao is a stand-in for all the novel's anxieties—"individualist" angst about collectivism, revolutionary terror, etc. It's all rather obvious. There also seems to be a strong Orientalist element in the book, what with every identifiably "eastern" icon inevitably associated with terror or the violent crowd. The most tedious parts of the novel are when the character Karen wanders through New York talking to every brown cab driving she sees and fetishizing their brownness. Possibly DeLillo was intending the character to seem a bit racist, but there seemed to be no point to it—it was just distasteful. More importantly, it was boring. I found myself wanting to skip over entire pages rather than sit through descriptions of Karen's ramblings through Central Park, and DeLillo's silly choice to repeat key sentences or phrases just to hammer in their significance for me. Yeah, I get it.

What's most surprising about the novel is that it manages to be political without actually being political at all. We have dealings with terrorists—in that we actually meet terrorists as characters—without addressing any kind of political or economic context. We have no idea why they do what they do, why their country's in the fix it's in, what their motivations are. It's all so abstract and philosophical. Mao and Khomeini (as spectres, outside the plot) and Abu Rashid (the terrorist inside the plot) all exist, but only as foils to the novel's Westerners, who absolutely must have these men to serve as a backdrop for their existential drama. In themselves, these terrorists have no individuality or motivation—not, in fact, because they are absorbed in a collectivist ideology, as the novel would have us think. No, this violence is done to them by the ideology of the novel itself. Terrorists, by the perspective we are given to accept as fact, fundamentally cannot have any rationale for their existence. This is not because they are merely base or evil—DeLillo isn't some crazy right-winger, mind you—it's simply because seriously considering such a rationale would bring up too many difficult questions. It would involve serious politics. DeLillo actually sidesteps the psychologism, the talk about "being shaped by a bad environment," many liberals offer as an explanation for terror—sidesteps it, and ignores the question completely. It's simply not, for his purposes, important in the least. The character Brita Nilsson says at one point that although she does not believe in a god, she has an existential need for other people to believe, and to bleed for their belief. Perhaps the characters of Mao II, and perhaps DeLillo himself, need terrorists in a similar way. To put it in another way, perhaps they need politics, i.e. people who are political, so that they themselves can be apolitical. Politics provides for them the raw material for their anxiety about crowds and a little bit of Baudrillardian exercise about mass media portrayals of violence, and we thereby get to dispense with politics as such.

I just realized I haven't mentioned Bill Gray, the reclusive novelist protagonist. Well, he's a boring character. They're all boring characters.

A note on the style. I've seen movies written like this, i.e. in which the characters speak to each other mostly in aphorisms. Somehow it works in these films, but here it's a little embarrassing.

Rereading this, I could be totally wrong about everything. Whatever. It's past midnight, don't judge me if I am.(less)

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Sep 20, 2010 E. Thomas rated it 4 of 5 stars

Written during the mid-period of his career and containing some of his best writing, Mao II is an ideal entry point for the DeLillo-neophyte. Like his creator, the central character, Bill Gray, is a reclusive novelist. For decades he has lived in isolation from the larger world, struggling with an incomplete fiction. Living with him are an amanuensis, Scott, and Scott's girlfriend Karen, recently escaped from the Moonies. The theme of the novel is summarized in the last line of the first chapter...more

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May 20, 2010 Fabian rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"The secret of me is that I'm only half here."

Andy (Warhol) says this and perhaps because I am a super nonfan of his I was a super nonfan of this.

The novel infuses you with images and DeLillo attempts to do something wholly Warholesque with his brand of literature. More discerning minds can tell me what that something is and what specific effect it produces. The novel is also about: the indifference of society personified by crowds, the act of writing as doppelganger for terrorism, and about "me...more

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Dec 12, 2009 Jonathan rated it 5 of 5 stars

On the one hand, DeLillo would appear to care more about the sentence as an art form than anyone I can think of this side of Donald Barthelme (and let's be clear: Barthelme might have cared as much as DeLillo does, but I don’t think he could do some of the things DeLillo seems to do almost instinctively –– certainly not over the course of whole novels).

And yet, in the early stages of many DeLillo books you get preposterous crap like this:

"He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beat...more On the one hand, DeLillo would appear to care more about the sentence as an art form than anyone I can think of this side of Donald Barthelme (and let's be clear: Barthelme might have cared as much as DeLillo does, but I don’t think he could do some of the things DeLillo seems to do almost instinctively –– certainly not over the course of whole novels).

And yet, in the early stages of many DeLillo books you get preposterous crap like this:

"He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows. Please Jesus let me work. Every book is a bug-eyed race, let's face it. Must finish. Can't die yet. He struck enough keys to make a sentence and thought about going down to say goodbye to her but it would only embarrass them both. Got what she came for, didn't she? I'm a picture now, flat as birdshit on a Buick."

So I've got a theory: In order to be the Don DeLillo who doesn’t apply his hypertalent for word and phrase to this kind of overwrought silliness, he needs to be operating within a conceptual arena appropriate to his particular set of gifts (which I guess I’d provisionally describe as on the one hand a relentless impulse to impose nomenclatural order, to use language as a kind of basket in which what we know of experience can be perfectly arranged {i.e. precision}; but on the other an uncanny capacity to send those blade-tipped sentences lancing into regions of experience that are ordinarily impervious to probe, to use language as a weapon that opens up the obscure {exploration? illumination?} {as I read it, The Names is in some respects a meta-meditation on DeLillo’s own obsession with language as both tool of demystification and portal into further mystery}), otherwise he seems to slip into the kind of sonorous wheel-spinning for which less enthusiastic readers sometimes take him to task.

At his best, DeLillo is simultaneously a lyric poet and a philosopher of the postmodern age, arraying the expression of his far-ranging thought as a jewelry store’s worth of sentence-gems –– but he isn’t always at his best. My theory (and in interviews DeLillo has nearly said as much) is that he needs to write his way into knowing what he wants to write about. So a typical book can take fifty or a hundred pages to warm itself up. Sometimes –– as in, for instance, White Noise –– this kind of pre-game calisthenics can be quite entertaining: the miniature set-pieces on campus and in Gladney’s home are of course quite funny, though that book’s first part only hints at the shape the whole novel will ultimately take. Sometimes –– as in Mao II and, to a lesser extent, The Names –– the wait for DeLillo to get going is kind of a drag.

But pace a substanceless parody I once read on McSweeney’s website, DeLillo rewards the reader’s patience with genuine vision, the latter stages of every novel I’ve read (six now, and counting) ascend into series of skywalks lined with windows opening onto pure mystery, and until I come to the end of a novel unaltered, I will continue to work through his oeuvre (maybe omitting The Body Artist, which I’ve heard from a number of sources is pretty unequivocally bad) even if it means wading through the occasional “Please Jesus let me work.”
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Apr 15, 2013 Nathan Wilcox rated it 5 of 5 stars

“True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts. And they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.” – Don DeLillo.

(I write this review on the same day as the Boston Marathon bombing and as a New Englander and as an American, the subject hits home. The underlying theme of terrorism within a society is becoming more and more true as art could, and should, imitate life. How else do we learn?)

I haven’t yet decided if I...more “True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts. And they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.” – Don DeLillo.

(I write this review on the same day as the Boston Marathon bombing and as a New Englander and as an American, the subject hits home. The underlying theme of terrorism within a society is becoming more and more true as art could, and should, imitate life. How else do we learn?)

I haven’t yet decided if I truly love DeLillo’s writings or the idea of DeLillo’s writing. I’ve graduated from one of his lighter (with respect to page length) books, ‘Cosmopolis’ to ‘Mao II’, and I am currently reading DeLillo’s opus ‘Underworld’. This order of events should tell you that I really enjoy his writings; specifically the vast ground they cover, both in the scope of time, distance, and ideas.

DeLillo carves out complex themes in our culture and sticks it right in your face like a spoon full of ‘Tussin. He takes social phenomenons, such as the herd mentality, and contrasts it brilliantly against the idea of the individual – how decisions are made and actions are carried out. Humans cannot shake the desire to congregate in order to feel accepted. To paraphrase DeLillo, “The future belongs to the crowds.”

In ‘Mao II’, the dynamic comparisons between a radical charlatan cleric, the former leader of China’s Communist party, a pop art icon, the death of a religious leader in Iran, and a reclusive writer reveal that DeLillo can successfully link ideas and people from around the world. Events such as Khomeini’s funeral and a mass wedding held at Yankee Stadium create an excellent backdrop for DeLillo’s deconstruction and analysis. And each setting is executed with the most breathe-taking prose – elegant and economic.

After a little research, I discovered that DeLillo was upset over the fatwa placed on fellow writer Salman Rushdie for his 1988 novel ‘The Satanic Versus’. In ‘Mao II’, DeLillo’s fictional protagonist, a writer named Bill Gray, appears to be a sly hybrid of Rushdie, JD Salinger, and himself (after participating in public readings of Rushdie’s work in protest to radical Muslim’s actions). DeLillo’s premise works. Gray’s actions, in protest to the attempts to silent free speech by radical Muslims, may be the suppressed fantasy of DeLillo; in a world where atonement from larger-than-life antagonists, that seem a world away, doesn’t necessarily come to fruition. The events simply unfold for the reader in an unfair world. But with Don, it’s always a hell of a ride.

Other reviewers complain about the lack of depth in DeLillo’s characters. For me, I see them as springboards or vessels used to catapult his ideas into life. We see brief snapshots of their lives, usually through prolific dialogue between each other. In the same manner, he uses art as a mirror held up to society and human nature. His poignant analysis is demonstrated to the reader and often a lesson learned for the characters. Sometimes they’re collateral damage.

Like many great writers, DeLillo has captured the fervor of the nation and pointed out critical paradoxes well before we even knew they existed. His novel deals with radical Islamic extremists and the acts of random violence used to terrorize the seemingly innocent and “disillusioned”. I’ve gathered from the novel and after a bit of research, including a few interviews in the NYT and the New Yorker, his frustration regarding losing the power of words within society. The ability to sway and instill fear, through literature or organized propaganda has taken a backseat to the blatant disregard for human life (hence, the opening quote).

How is this all relevant, nearly twenty years after ‘Mao II’ was written? The obvious answer in 9/11 and the world we live in today. I’d love to see DeLillo tackle the real changes we now face as a country, where the rubber hits the road – the invasion of privacy of all citizens under the Patriot Act, the abuse of war power acts and Executive powers, our eagerness to send our troops into the two of the longest and most expensive wars, the false sense of security we have created with a militarized domestic police force, and thousands of unnecessary deaths. That is why I’ll be reading ‘The Falling Man’ (about 9/11) after ‘Underworld’ - to see if this brilliant author has made the connection that many political pundits and scholars have made and eventually, I believe, will be on the correct side of history. And to see if he can conceptualize this through literature – probably one of the most difficult things to do, while still so close to it all.

DeLillo’s premonition: “the future belongs to crowds” may lay true for the latter half of the 20th century. ‘Mao II’ was written right before a technological revolution sparked by the Internet; technology that can bring people together in completely new ways and topple excessive and tyrannical governments.

I think DeLillo did a better job of piecing it all together with ‘Cosmopolis’ – his book that deals with the burst of the tech bubble in 2000 and corrects his assumptions about the masses.
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Sep 22, 2012 Joel rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a pretty cool 250 pg book about about individualism vs being a part of a group or crown. It asks a lot of questions about the future and the struggle to remain independent and freethinking in the modern world, and each character deals with this differently. The book's plot centers around a reclusive writer that eventually gets loosely involved with terrorists groups; it’s interesting enough. BUt the strength of this book is the strong themes and the characters used to convey them. I real...more

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Nov 03, 2011 Cbj rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: totalitarian

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. An incredibly bleak and tough novel, Mao II is about a world where the moral consciousness of the people are controlled by terrorists and messiahs rather than writers. The writers are in state of retreat because their freedom of speech and expression has narrowed. Their space is now occupied by terrorists. Delillo writes: "What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they...more

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Apr 25, 2013 Eric rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Great and unsettling book. DeLillo is all about getting to the heart of matters and reflecting deeply on everything he writes about. Some parts of this book left me awestruck. As usual, there's a lot of musing on the general state of current society (despite being written nearly 25 years ago, it's still all very true), as well as media, art, and terrorism. The reader gets the impression that DeLillo thinks about this stuff constantly and deeply, and he might well have gone for a series of long d...more

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Oct 27, 2012 Julia rated it 3 of 5 stars

don delillo is really fantastic at forming sentences. in terms of meaning and structure and sound and how they all coalesce. it's great. just thought it bore saying. and again i am in love with his dialogue, how it manages to communicate important information and themes while still often falling into a weird nonrhythmic thing where people reply unrelatedly, don't finish their sentences but end them in periods because what they judge necessary to say has been said. so in total a weird tension bet...more

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Jan 31, 2012 Sophie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Yay, Delillo!

"Oatmeal and water. Bread and jelly. Row row row your boat. Karen said to them, Lose sleep, it is for sins. Lose weight, it is for sins. Lose hair, lose nail off finger, lose whole hand, whole arm, it go on scale to stand against sins."

"I picked your face out of the air as this is someone I can trust."

"I have a schedule that's really quite firm and I haven't, you know, brought days and days of underwear."

"The signs for Mita, Midori, Kirin, Magno, Suntory -- words that were part of s...more

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Feb 15, 2011 Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars

What can you say? This is a good collection of situations and ideas. It might be the most digestible dose of DeLillo. (Most people would say White Noise, but this is more serious, however you want to take that.) It's not a great story, but there are interesting moments. The opening, set in a baseball stadium, is excellent, maybe even superior to the baseball stadium opening of Underworld, because it's less labored. Yeah, this might even be my favorite DeLillo. It's good to read him when you're w...more

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Dec 16, 2012 David rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As you might gather from the fence-sitting score I've given this book, I had my ups and downs with it. As with DeLillo's opus "Underworld", "Mao II" opens with an incredible set-piece scene that stays with you for a long time afterwards - this time it's a mass wedding orchestrated by the religious cult known as the Moonies. As with the opening baseball game scene in the later book, the wedding scene here is epic in its scale but human in its insight, vividly written and deeply resonant with powe...more As you might gather from the fence-sitting score I've given this book, I had my ups and downs with it. As with DeLillo's opus "Underworld", "Mao II" opens with an incredible set-piece scene that stays with you for a long time afterwards - this time it's a mass wedding orchestrated by the religious cult known as the Moonies. As with the opening baseball game scene in the later book, the wedding scene here is epic in its scale but human in its insight, vividly written and deeply resonant with powerful ideas about our world today. In short, it's one of those scenes where DeLillo proves himself a great contemporary writer. Unfortunately, after this great start the reader's heart starts to sink as we move into the main phase of the book, in which a photographer arrives in New York to photograph a reclusive writer. It's not that writers writing about other writers necessarily makes for bad work (see for example, Dennis Potter's Philip Marlowe in his masterpiece, "The Singing Detective" - a writer tormented by creations that are out of control and that he can't fully understand), but here we quickly get to exactly the kind of tortured abstract conversations about The Writer that deservedly give this stuff a bad name.

The book does get better - indeed, it has become by the end a rather satisfying work and I suspect a second reading will be quite different to the first. It's when the writer character has become dislodged from the centre of the book's world that "Mao II" starts to improve and ultimately it might be better read from the off as an ensemble piece. I wonder, in fact, whether this might ultimately turn out to be part of DeLillo's point, which is what makes me think a re-read might be time while spent and might give me a less ambiguous opinion about the book.

I'm happy to describe this as a well written book, with moments of genuine brilliance. I appreciate, as well, that it's a book that's made me work hard before releasing its rewards. But I'm not quite there with it yet.(less)

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Aug 10, 2012 Mike Gilbert rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literature

Don Delillo consistently produces engaging stories that include the plots as even further far fetched than the worst science fiction. Perhaps its because his stories - set in a time somewhat our own - are filled with people afflicted by insanities so insidious that so you can't imagine they are real while at the same time believe you might suffer form them yourself.. None of his lead characters are dangerously insane or even that unbelievable on the surface, but I always leave his novels feeling...more

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Apr 22, 2010 Melody rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: third-thursday-bookgroup

I finished the book this morning. I’m going to have to read it again. I admit I rushed toward the end. I’m catching a plane this morning and I didn’t want to take an almost completed book to read and no I don’t have or want a Kindle. I followed the plot. I loved the writing: his sentences that slowly trickled into my shower with me this morning. But I missed some connecting lines. Some dots were left isolated - not part of the completed pictures. Plus I keep adding and taking away star rating –...more

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Jan 22, 2011 Spiros rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: those curious to view the abnegation of Self

Shelves: freebox, niew-amsterdam

Written in 1991, this book augurs the event of September 11, 2001 better than anything I can remember ever having read. In describing the path taken by its central figure, an author who has sequestered himself from the public eye, as he emerges from voluntary isolation to something much more drastic over which he will have no control, DeLillo gives us the following paragraph, which might be one of my all-time favorites:

"He was often lost. He got lost in the hotel every time he walked out of his...more

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Sep 06, 2012 Lynn rated it 2 of 5 stars

I had to do an author study of Don DeLillo for my senior research class in college- all I can say is that I didn't know even remotely enough world history to truly understand his stories or truly enjoy reading him- Maybe the history/ Social science majors were a better suited audience for his works. I remember my professor's comments about my final paper "It starts out really strong but it starts to fall apart after page ten." -well of course it did! How can you put a fifteen page requirement on...more

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